Valerie Macon did achieve one thing: She got more people talking about poetry than any four of her predecessors as poet laureate of North Carolina. Ask yourself: When was the last time, other than book-banning, that literature became a serious political issue in this state?

By now, everyone knows the story. Macon resigned Thursday (July 17), less than a week after Gov. Pat McCrory appointed her to the largely honorary 2-year job. Established literary types took loud umbrage when it turned out that the 64-year-old Macon had produced only two relatively short poetry collections, all within the last four years, and that she had self-published them both.

The governor’s office did her no service by padding her resume in its announcement with a couple of easily detectable fibs. (She had never been a “Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet”; she’d only studied under one.)

In the past, the poet laureate was selected on nominations from a panel of poets and academics assembled under the aegis of the N.C. Arts Council. McCrory totally ignored that process, explaining later that he didn’t even know there WAS a process.

(Procedures had been spelled out on the arts council’s website, but the page mysteriously vanished from the Internet during the week, like so much involved with this story. Macon’s personal website has also been down all week.)

By the time national news media started up the story, the game was up. Macon wisely decided to drop out, saying she didn’t want to distract from the poet laureate’s mission.

By most accounts, this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Macon had apparently helped organize a free-pick vegetable garden in Durham, available to poor and homeless people, and she donated proceeds from sales of one of her chapbooks to the project. Susan Kluttz, McCrory’s appointee as state secretary of cultural resources (the N.C. Arts Council’s boss), said she and McCrory had been impressed by her charitable work. But that’s the sort of thing you give a person the Order of the Long Leaf Pine or some other citation for, not a literary award.

The thing was, most of Macon’s predecessors — Fred Chappell, Sam Ragan, Kathryn Stripling Byer — had been writing for decades and had built strong reputations. Vance was, at best, a relative beginner. It was as if I was suddenly named starting quarterback for the Carolina Panthers.

None of this, I suspect, will hurt the governor very much, at least not with folks who weren’t mad at him already. In remarks on Wednesday and Thursday, McCrory seems to be spinning the whole affair as “cultural elites” (entitled liberals with their cushy, tenured college jobs ) picking on a poor, honest, salt-of-the-earth Ordinary American (Macon). (For example, read this.) It sort of recalls the late Sen. Karl Mundt’s argument that mediocre people deserve representation on the U.S. Supreme Court.

And, to be honest, the liberals walked right into his trap. Not all of the critics were as careful as UNCW’s Lavonne Adams to distinguish between Macon and the larger issues. (For Adams’ comments, click here.)

And, in striking at McCrory through Macon, some of the commentators got just plain nasty. (For example, read how Chris Vitello rips apart one of Macon’s poems in Indy Week — click here.)

From what I can tell, McCrory’s tactic will work. The tone of some of my phone messages Friday morning went: Who knew that North Carolina had a poet laureate? (It has, since the late 1940s.) Who really cares? And should we even have a poet laureate at all? This parallels some theories bouncing about online, from conspiracy theorists on the Left, that McCrory essentially appointed Macon to fail, so that he could justify abolishing the job in a year or two.

Not that the job costs very much. Macon’s predecessor, Joseph Bathanti, ran up a tab of $15,000 or so in Arts Council grants, mostly for projects tied to education.

A mystery still remains: How exactly did McCrory pick Macon in the first place? Some speculation has focused on her husband, Mikel D. Macon, identified as a minister with Wake Up America Inc., a non-denominational church in Fuquay-Varina that’s been involved in some Religious Right campaigns. (Funny: Most web information about Mikel Macon seems to have vanished as well.)

So, who do you think McCrory should appoint to replace Macon? Maya Angelou, alas, just died, but a lot of other poets are walking around North Carolina. Several people, I notice, nominated themselves on Facebook. Any suggestions? Any volunteers?

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.